Hide and seek: Directing top-down attention is not sufficient for accelerating conscious access.
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior January 1, 2020 Surya Gayet, Iris Douw, V. V. D. Burg et al.
Directing top-down attention to a specific location or a narrowly defined feature (color) does not accelerate the conscious detection of suppressed visual stimuli at that location or of that feature, even when attention is successfully manipulated. However, when attention is directed to a color using a broader attentional template (ill-defined shape), conscious access is faster for probes in the attended color. These findings suggest that the specificity of attentional templates imposes limitations on the ability of top-down attention to bias which visual information reaches consciousness.